Unconventional advice about staying creative and making a living in the post-corporate world

Jul 03, 2013

We could have had some of these on Wills Ridge in Floyd, if we had just gone with the flow and decided to be green at all cost. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and we can observe what others have done. Wind turbines may play a part in our future, but more work has to be done before they can be considered environmentally safe or economically sensible.

The US has had wind farms since 1981, what the left and the green
movement don't want to talk about regarding windmills is (as usual) the
truth. The truth is: windmills, like solar panels, break down. And
like solar panels, windmills produce less energy before they break down
than the energy it took to make them. That's the part liberals forget:
making windmills and solar panels takes energy, energy from coal, oil,
and diesel, energy that extracts and refines raw materials, energy that
transports those materials to where they will be re-shaped into finished
goods, energy to manufacture those goods. More energy than those
finished windmills and solar panels will ever produce.

There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the
pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird
choppers, the blight on people's lives of noise and the flicker factor
and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these
blots on the landscape. The symbol of Green renewable energy, our
saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind
farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the
subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very
expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons
like it's too cold or the wind speed is too high.

The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines
abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just
left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green
Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about
the abandoned wind farms.

"Some say that Ka Le is haunted--and it is. But it's haunted not by
Hawaii's legendary night marchers. The mysterious sounds are "Na leo o
Kamaoa"-- the disembodied voices of 37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned
to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm. . .
The ghosts of Kamaoa are not alone in warning us. Five other abandoned
wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles--but it is in California where the
impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. Thousands
of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy's
California "big three" locations--Altamont Pass, Tehachapin, and San
Gorgonio--considered among the world's best wind sites. . .
California's wind farms-- comprising about 80% of the world's wind
generation capacity--ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa.
In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply
abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but
bird kills. . ."

The problem with wind farms when they are abandoned is getting the
turbines removed, as usual there are no Green environmentalists to be
seen. The City of Palm Springs was forced to enact an ordinance
requiring their removal from San Gorgonio. But California's Kern County,
encompassing the Tehachapi area, has no such law. Imagine the outraged
Green chorus if those turbines were abandoned oil drilling rigs.

The truth is: wind energy is just a tax scam. Ben Lieberman, a senior
policy analyst focusing on energy and environmental issues for the
Heritage Foundation, is not surprised. He asks:

"If wind power made sense, why would it need a government subsidy in the
first place? It's a bubble which bursts as soon as the government
subsidies end."

And therein lies a lesson for those who seek to make fortunes out of tax
payer subsidies, and for those who want to live in a dream world of
"clean energy", the whole renewables industry of solar, wind and biomass
is just an artificial bubble incapable of surviving without subsides
from governments and tax payers. The Green evangelists who push so hard
for these wind farms, as usual have not thought the whole idea through.

Altamont's turbines have since 2008 been tethered four months of every
year in an effort to protect migrating birds after environmentalists
filed suit. According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, 75 to 110
Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-tailed Hawks, and 333
American Kestrels (falcons) are killed by Altamont turbines annually. A
July, 2008 study by the Alameda County Community Development Agency
points to 10,000 annual bird deaths from Altamont Pass wind turbines.
Audubon calls Altamont, "probably the worst site ever chosen for a wind
energy project." The same areas that are good for siting wind farms are
also good for birds of prey and migrating birds to pass through, shame
for the birds that none of the Green mental midgets who care so much
about everything in nature, thought that one through when pushing their
anti fossil fuel agenda. After the debacle of the First California Wind
Rush, the European Union had moved ahead of the US on efforts to
subsidize "renewable" energy--including a "Feed in Tariff" even more
lucrative than the ISO4 contracts. The tax payers who paid for the
subsidies to build the wind farms, then paid over the odds for an
unreliable source of power generation, will ultimately be left to pick
up the bill for clearing up the Green eco mess in the post
Man-Made-Global-Warming world.

Apr 15, 2013

Dec 12, 2012

I started this blog in 2003, with the encouragement of Fred First, whose Fragments from Floyd blog finally inspired me to move to this part of Virginia.

After years of commenting endlessly on other blogs, I decided it was time to start some ripples of my own.

I had already considered that blogging might be the equivalent of writing in the sandy margin of the sea, but I feltl the lifespan of many books is not as long as the life of an active weblog. It's the readership that matters. If an idea takes root in someone elses mind and gets passed on, that's reward enough.

Since then, I have had more than 642482 visitors and have written a book based on my experinces in the corporate world, Danger Quicksand - Have a Nice Day, which is still being downloaded by people who are looking for more satisfying work.

In the last few years, my interests have expanded from writing about ideas for staying creative and making a living in the post-corporate world, to developing a personal and business counseling practice, to involvement in local and national issues that affect our friends and family.

During this same period, I have seen a transformation in the nature of the Internet and social networks. This single blog became a series of blogs and my writing has recently expanded into multiple facebook groups which offer interaction with specific groups of readers without boring the others.

When I first started witing, my focus was on dealing with adverse working conditions and barriers to career satisfaction. Once Danger Quicksand was published and I moved to SW Virginia, my focus went to small town life here in Floyd. The artisans and artists provided an entirely new set of opportunities and I set about meeting and promoting those who made life in Floyd so satisfying. I also wrote about the restaurants and local businesses which gave this county its unique character.

I was really enjoying what I was doing, but a long time reader wrote me and said that I was no longer writing the business advice that had attracted him to my site. He wished me well, but he needed what I was no longer doing and needed to move on.

Well, the evolution still continues, but in the thousands of articles I have written, there are many which seem to have lasting value because they still get frequent hits from search engines. I am planning to restructure this site so it is easier to locate the articles of lasting value and to see where I am writing on subjects of specific interest.

I also hope to make this site easier to use and comment on. Your readership has been very encouraging and I want the site to be as useful as possible.

We are heading into rough financial times and I feel that sharing useful information is one way to even the odds.

Nov 07, 2012

Barack Obama has won the Presidential election with a 1.7% margin of the popular vote. That makes for an evenly divided country with the cities being Democratic and the rural areas being Republican.

We may see gridlock on a continuing basis with a Republican House and a Democratic Senate and Executive Branch, but Obama now has the chance to stack the Supreme Court with Liberal judges, so his plans for making the US a Socialist country will continue at an accellerated rate.

The only problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money so we will probably encounter problems with the current uncontrolled printing of money as the government spends more than the country produces.

Will we see more bankrupt cities? I think so, but I could be wrong. The idea of more Detroits makes me shudder.

Either the Administration figures out how to get its act together so American small businesses can grow and prosper or we will see a rapid growth in an underground economy where more and more transactiona are being done off the books in an effort to evade confiscatory taxes.

Living in flyover country will have more significance than ever before. I can envision that the quality of rural life and urban life will move in different directions as pressures increase to make the government provide an ever increasing range of free services.

If we can keep working together at the local levels and avoid the extreme polarization which has permeated the political scene for the past two years, we will probably be able to come to a rational solution that benefits our families and the children to come.

Looking at our common needs and desires can allow us to work through the issues of the next four years. Looking only at our philosophical differences will get us nothing but strife and stagnation.

It will definitely be a challenge and challenges are best handled with the most cheerful attitude we can muster. Let's make it happen!